felt

Looking over the edge of the snow-smoothed canyon down to dark rushing water, we thought we saw a moose or a reindeer, but it could have been a rock. The light was fading fast so it was hard to tell. It was time to turn back; we didn’t want to get lost in the wood, or fall into the river. By the time we’d retraced our steps to Abisko, the blue world had turned to black and dust-like snowflakes whirled around the little village. Back in our hotel room after our expedition, I looked at my phone – it was only 2pm!

Travelling to the Arctic Circle in winter had always been a dream, but when I realised the sun wouldn’t get above the horizon on my holiday, it made me twitchy. I usually pack my limited annual leave as tightly as I pack my working life. I was already using up three days’ holiday travelling by train from London to Abisko. How would I make the most of my time there with barely any daylight?

My partner and I chose to stop in this small village in Swedish Lapland almost by chance, when we researched the most northerly stops on the train line between Stockholm and Narvik. Abisko looked on the map like a tiny enclave surrounded by lakes and mountains. Reading more about it, we found that it was home to the Abisko blue hole – a unique microclimate where the geography creates frequent clear skies, making it one of the most reliable places on Earth to see the aurora borealis.

After a blur of cities and sleeper trains, we arrived at Abisko Ostra, a tiny station comprising just one low platform and a glass shelter over the exit door, at 11am. We jumped down from the high step of the carriage into soft, deep snow, our feet creating the only imprints on the length of the walkway. White mist hung all around us, and the couple of buildings we could see were fading into the sky. Apart from the icy train tracks cutting a sharp black detail, everything in the landscape appeared icing soft.

We walked along an empty road that curved up to the Abisko Mountain Lodge, one of a handful of accommodation options we had found online. Our room wasn’t quite ready, so we spent a while in the hotel’s warm, firelit bar watching people change into their outdoor gear then disappear into the cold. Knowing that darkness would soon set in, I was itching to get outside as well – while we could still see our surroundings.

By the time we were salopetted up, thick clouds had made the white world grey, but it was still everything my Christmas-film-loving inner child had imagined. The path we followed was lined with low lights glowing yellow against the white landscape, guiding us among houses with bright windows illuminating the dusk. We followed our phone map towards a viewpoint by a river. It was only half an hour’s walk, but in the deep snow it seemed much longer, and felt like walking through a thick white cloud.

We had expected to spend the day exploring. Instead, we’d somehow finished our outing before the afternoon had properly begun. Feeling the luxury of time stretching out, we made tea in our room and read for a while, but we still had plenty of time before dinner, so we went for a few rounds in the sauna.

In the restaurant later, we heard an excited murmur among the diners. The aurora! We rushed out, wearing the clothes we’d been eating dinner in, and watched the green glow, our feet growing more and more numb. But the night was still young, so we got back into our cold-weather gear and walked up a path to higher ground where a family were making snow angels while watching nature’s light show. Their enthusiasm added to our excitement, and we found ourselves not wanting to look away from the dancing sky in case it got better or brighter. Our initial walk to the canyon felt like days ago but we’d only arrived 12 hours earlier.

The next day, after a long and leisurely breakfast of pickled herring, gherkins and lots of delicious rye bread, we hiked a few hours along the bank of Lake Torneträsk. The snow on the path was compact enough for us to explore in our hiking boots, but we saw a few adventurous groups snowshoeing through the wilderness. We followed a narrow path through bare silver birches weighed down with bulbous drifts, until we found a picnic spot near a frozen waterfall, where we enjoyed some provisions we’d squirreled away from the generous breakfast.

I did a double-take as I looked back at the way we had come. The sunrise-like colour seemed to be glowing in exactly the same way as when we’d set off, hours before. Unable to tell if it was morning or afternoon, I felt my sense of time opening up. The sun remained below the horizon, but its colourful glow hung in the sky for hours. The pinks and oranges slowly brightened, lingered, then imperceptibly began to fade. The ideas of dawn, midday and evening began to fade, too.

From the waterfall, we walked up to a high viewpoint and ate flapjacks as we watched the hidden sun cast a last ray of deep orange towards the horizon. We warmed up with hot chocolate in the Abisko Turiststation hotel, drying snow-damp clothes on a radiator before heading back into the cold. The stars were out by then – in the mid-afternoon. We took the long path back to the village and headed through the misty gloom towards the red neon sign and strip-light interior of the supermarket to stock up on snacks for the next day’s train journey.

The supermarket was designed for people likely to get snowed in, with lots of produce for sale in bulk, but we found delicious jars of pickled herring, cloudberry jam and more of the region’s dense rye bread to tide us over, along with a squeezy tube of cheese spread from the surprisingly varied range that covered almost a whole aisle. Back at our hotel, we had another sauna, then dinner, before a beer in the cosy hotel bar. Then we headed outside again. It had been dark for hours, but it was still only early evening.

We were due to take a cable car up to Abisko Sky Station, a mountain viewpoint 900 metres (nearly 3,000ft) above sea level, but high winds meant the 20-minute cable car journey was too dangerous, so our evening’s plans changed shape. Our guide took us to an outcrop above Lake Torneträsk, where we got another spectacular show of the aurora, complete with shooting stars, courtesy of the Geminids. I have no idea how long we stood there, admiring the sky. I’d stopped trying to fit the holiday into my idea of what should be done when.

Later, we warmed up with reindeer soup in a building shaped like a traditional Sámi lávvu, a conical structure with a central fire for warmth and light. Our guide told us some of the myths and legends surrounding the aurora: that the lights were ancestors dancing, or a fox spirit running through the sky with snow attached to its tail. He also showed us the best forecasting apps to use, like the Aurora Buddy and My Aurora, and what all the bars on the various graphs meant. The northern lights lit the darkest part of our walk home.

I came to Abisko worrying that darkness would take something away from my trip, but instead it removed the boundaries that normally suggest what I should be doing when. When the distinction between night and day dissolved, there unexpectedly seemed to be more holiday in front of me. It felt like a surprisingly liberating way to travel.

EXCLUSIVE: His co-star Tessa Peake-Jones, who played Raquel, says it was ‘poignant and quite sobering’ watching the comedy legend grapple with the past

Only Fools and Horses star Tessa Peake-Jones has told how Sir David Jason felt saddened watching himself playing Del Boy in lost archive clips, as he hankered to be back in his prime.

The actress, who played his wife Raquel from 1988 for 15 years, says she enjoyed sitting with him, and other actors from the hit BBC sitcom, to watch newly discovered gems that they all believed had been lost many decades ago.

But she revealed that at times the 86-year-old became maudlin as he looked back. “You know, he’d just been knighted, he was in every programme going, Darling Buds of May, all of them. And he said, ‘There I am in my prime, and now here I am as an old man sitting watching it.’ I found that really quite moving.

“He just said, ‘Oh, I’m finding it very sad,’ and I said, ‘What do you mean?’ I ended up becoming his therapist on the sofa and he said, ‘I just I look at myself then in my prime as the best I could possibly be,’ which of course he was then – in his forties and fifties, he was more famous than anyone in Britain on telly.

“And I knew what he meant when he said he felt sad because this is us looking back on what we were, particularly for him because he was at his absolute peak. It must have felt very peculiar. You’re not ever going to be what you were then.”

And she added: “He’s still a very vibrant man, he’s got a lot of energy, he’s doing things all the time, but it was just very poignant and quite sobering.”

At the end of the first episode, which airs on Tuesday, David can’t get over how good the pair of them looked back then. “It is difficult because we are looking back at a time when we were both beautiful,” he says. Tessa responds with positivity, telling him: “Maybe we still are but we don’t see it as easily.”

But speaking afterwards she said she had also found watching the lost archive clips and outtakes difficult at times too. “Some actors really like looking at themselves. I will run a mile, I absolutely loathe it. So it was slightly torturous for me, particularly because not only are you watching scenes that you’re acting in, but you’re 30 years older.”

She believes that the secret of the comedy’s longevity is that its humour, written by the late John Sullivan and also starring Nicholas Lyndhurst as Rodney, had universal appeal. “John didn’t leave anyone out. He really cared about family and he cared about what people shared watching on telly.

“I know we all go, ‘oh, isn’t Del awful with all his scams’, but at the end of the day he’d do anything for anyone. He was kind. Looking at comedy these days, bar the odd brilliant one like Ghosts, some of them are quite cruel. It doesn’t make me laugh when you see someone being horrid about someone else.”

Tessa, now 69, says that she has received thousands of letters from fans over the years wanting to talk about her role as Raquel.

But even though she was in Only Fools for many years, she still gets more fan mail for one tiny role that she played in 2013.

“I had 30 seconds of screen time on Doctor Who,” she laughs. “But it happened to be when one Doctor becomes another. I was in a Christmas special when it happened – it was Matt Smith leaving and Peter Capaldi coming in. I must have had six lines in it, maybe seven. But I’ve had more fan mail about that 30 seconds of screen time than anything I’ve ever done in my career.”

She said the Only Fools fans aren’t far behind the Doctor Who ones. “We have many extremely obsessive fans who are almost as as powerfully connected.”

Tessa said the remaining cast from the hit sitcom were all astonished to hear that 66 bits of film, including full scenes and outtakes, had been discovered. “What’s so hilarious is that I believe all these bits and bobs were found in like a drawer at the BBC in White City,” she laughs. “Think what other gems are in drawers somewhere in those buildings. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it?”

She said it had been hard at times to work out if she even knew whether the clips had been cut from the original upsides. “I suppose you’re you’re wound up in the general whirly gig of all of it. You’re rehearsing constantly. You’re filming every weekend – life’s marching at quite a pace. So I suppose even when you record these things, if they don’t get put in, you sort of forget them.”

But, in the films, Sir David marvels at just how much ends up on the cutting room floor. He laughs: “I remember discussing it with John – we cut more jokes out than other shows had got in their entire episode.” The extra bits span 10 episodes from the 90s and cover the stories about blow-up dolls, Peckham Spring water, Cassandra’s miscarriage and Raquel giving birth to Damian., as well as the Jolly Boys coach trip to Margate.

By the time Tessa joined in 1988 the show had been on air for seven years and was a huge hit. The actress is enormously proud of the reaction her first episode got, when Derek Trotter first met Raquel on a blind date. “John wrote that brilliant script and it’s the only time the programme’s ever won a BAFTA,” she recalls. “He did that just to see what would happen for Del Boy’s character if if he was to fall in love.”

Having conceived Raquel as a one-off character, the writer quickly changed his mind. “John saw the public response and thought he could take this character of Raquel further – that it might change the dynamics of Derek and Rodney Trotter’s relationship. He thought, ‘Iet’s bring her back and see what happens’. And then a lot did happen. Such a lot.”

Unlike Sir David Tessa does not consider Only Fools to be the pinnacle of her career. “This was one of many, many things. I wouldn’t call it the thing I’m proudest of, I don’t think it’s my greatest achievement being in Only Fools, much as I’ve loved doing it. I’ve still got to meet my peak,” she laughs. “I might reach it next year.”

And well she might because 2027 brings viewers not only the last series of ITV’s Grantchester, in which Tessa has played vicarage housekeeper Sylvia Chapman since 2014, but also new Channel 5 crime series The Last Resort, in which she stars as a sixty-something sleuth alongside Caroline Quentin and Jason Watkins.

Tessa believes that, for fans, these new documentaries will be the last surprise from Only Fools and Horses, which is marking its 45th anniversary having launched in 1981.. “We’re all too old and also there is no one to carry John Sullivan’s mantle,” she says. “He was a one-off genius. So I don’t think there can be any other surprises. Thank God for things like UK Gold – who knows, in 100 years people might still be watching it.”

– Only Fools and Horses: The Lost Archive, U&Gold, Tuesday 20th & 27th October